Sunday 11th March - Letter writing

I have been browsing blogs in the evenings - there are millions and millions of them (yes, yes I did know that already). I have searched in different categories, and last night I searched for "letter writing blogs". There are a lot of people out there who are great afficionados of real letters arriving through real letterboxes. A number of them are in the middle of letter-writing projects; to write a letter every day, or every week. Some of them put up a photograph of the card they have used. There is one blogger who writes a complete back-story about the relationship between herself and the recipient of the letter. Fortunately this back-story is always (at least so far this year) in the most glowing and rose-tinted language. Just imagine the possibilities....

"Today I have chosen to write to Esmeralda" (name chosen at random, any likeness to any person, living or dead, purely unintentional and accidental). Anyway, to continue my hypothetical letter to a hypothetical person "I have known her forever, at least for the last twenty years, and I am writing to tell her that I think she is just so......"

now, the rest of this paragraph could go either way. Is Esmeralda a paragon of virtue who is going to get a beautiful hand-crafted and personally embellished letter extolling all the ways that she has made the world a better place? Or will she receive a brutal dissection of all the imperfections of her character, a list of all the slights, snubs and crimes she has perpetrated against the writer, on a nasty card which has been spat on (or worse!) before being sealed with a sneer into its envelope?

Do you know, on the whole, I would prefer not to receive either letter? If I am as perfect as Esmeralda version 1, then a gushing epistle is the last thing that I would appreciate, and if I am as dastardly as Esmeralda verion 2, I would feel myself justified in taking any form of revenge I cared to imagine.

However, I do like writing letters, and send a couple of letters every week. Here are some of this week's; another two have already gone. There is quite an art to arranging them in the photograph so that the addresses all remain confidential. I have had to resort to a bit of trickery - the top "postcard" is actually a photograph taken by - well, he will know who he is - and I hope he doesn't mind that I have used it. Perhaps I'll write him a letter on the back, and send it to him with the others, by way of acknowledgement.